U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer brought her reelection campaign to a small, crowded room on the first floor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's city campus union this month, meeting in a town hall-style format with a few dozen students who attended the Oct. 9 gathering of UNL's College Republicans.
Fischer, the 73-year-old Republican incumbent who has found herself in a closer-than-expected race with nonpartisan challenger Dan Osborn as she seeks a third 6-year term in the Senate, was stopped in her tracks by one question in particular: "If you could pass any one policy in the next term, what would it be?"
"Oh wow," Nebraska's senior U.S. senator said, before see-sawing between two pieces of legislation she said she had been championing for "a long time."
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"I could list a whole bunch of stuff," Fischer said, before settling on an answer: "Paid family leave."
It was perhaps a surprising response from a GOP lawmaker in Nebraska, where efforts to codify sick leave are most associated with liberals. After attempts by Democrats to make the policy state law failed repeatedly in the Legislature, advocates funded by progressive megadonors have turned instead to the ballot initiative process.
Fischer's plan differs from the one Nebraska voters will consider next month, which would require businesses of all sizes to offer at least five days of sick leave to employees each year.
Instead, she a pilot tax credit program that incentivizes business to voluntarily offer workers up to 12 weeks of paid family medical leave. The pilot program — which Fischer is working to extend with the help of independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats — is set to expire after 2025.
"It's not just maternity or paternity leave — it truly is family leave," Fischer told the College Republicans, who she spoke with for nearly an hour, almost exclusively about policy issues, including international trade, immigration and her work on the Senate Committee on Armed Services.
"I love policy," she told the group.
Fischer's remarks to the students mirrored her pitch to Nebraska voters at large. Twelve years after she rose from the Legislature to the U.S. Senate on a platform that included her record as a lawmaker — but also an aggressive array of Washington reforms and a dissatisfaction with "career politicians" — Fischer is making the case of a reliable incumbent whose experience in Congress is an asset, not a drawback.
That's why, she said, she decided to seek a third term, breaking in the Senate.
"It was a difficult decision to decide to run again. My husband and I, we talked about it. But Nebraska — with me in the Senate, Nebraska's in a really good position now," Fischer said in an interview this month, pointing to the benefits of her seniority in the body, particularly on the Armed Services and Commerce committees, where she is among the Senate's longest-tenured members.
"To have Nebraska at the seat at the table, that makes a difference for the people of this state," said Fischer, a Lincoln native and UNL graduate. "And I don't think people realize that."
That pitch is not wholly in-step with the tenor of her 2012 campaign, when Fischer, then a state lawmaker from the Sandhills, leaned into her status as an effective "citizen-legislator" in Nebraska's statehouse while calling Washington "broken."
"People are tired of career politicians," Fischer said then. "We can't keep sending the same kind of persons to Washington or things won't change."
She rode the populist message — and her accomplishments in the Legislature, where Fischer had secured funding for years worth of highway construction projects in 2011 — to a victory in the 2012 GOP Senate primary. Months later, Fischer won more than 57% of votes cast in the general election to clinch a seat in the Senate. She won reelection by a similar margin in 2018.
Now, Fischer is still billing herself as "the policy candidate," known around the state for her work that transcends party politics. Among the 1,000+ endorsements her campaign touts is that of the Nebraska Farmers Union, a group with a traditionally liberal bend that did not endorse her in 2012 or 2018 — and endorsed Democrat Preston Love Jr. over Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts this year.
Fischer, too, said she still believes Washington is broken. That's why, she said, she pushed to get on the Senate's Appropriations Committee, which she hopes will where the federal government would be funded by 12 separate bills rather than packing the legislation into a single measure.
"The system's broken," she said. "It was broken then. It's broken now. But I think I've been effective in being an agent of change to be more accountable to the people."
Fischer, though, is not the only candidate in the race making that pitch. Osborn, a mechanic and U.S. Navy veteran, is trying to unseat Fischer in part by deploying the same kind of rhetoric.
A former union president who led a 77-day strike at Kellogg’s in 2021, Osborn has called Congress a "country club" full of millionaires and has repeatedly declared: "There is no one like me in the U.S. Senate."
His message appears to be resonating as he tries to become the first non-Republican elected to the Senate in Nebraska since 2006. A series of polls have shown Osborn within striking distance of — if not leading — Fischer, whose campaign released its first internal poll since July last week that by 6%.
Fischer conceded that the race is closer than she expected it to be, a reality she attributed to what she cast as Osborn's indefinite stances.
"My opponent is not defined," she said. "He says he's an independent, but yet his funding comes from ActBlue. ... People see his yard signs next to 'Harris-Walz.' People are getting a clearer picture of who he is. He doesn't discuss, truly, the issues. It's just — well, attacks on me — but it's just sound bites. There's no depth there. People are starting to see that."
In a statement, a spokesman for Osborn's campaign said he "has the most detailed policy platform of any Senate candidate in Nebraska this year, and it’s defined by the needs of farmers, small businesses, and hardworking families across the political spectrum."
When she first sought office in Washington, Fischer pledged to reform D.C., repeal the Affordable Care Act, focus on economic recovery and cut the federal budget deficit. She also positioned herself as a hardliner on immigration, calling for stricter border control and penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.
This time around, Fischer is running on some of the same platforms. She said inflation and immigration are the two issues that come up more often than any others as she travels the state for her reelection campaign.
"A week ago, I had an older gentlemen stop me in the parking lot at Hy-Vee here in Lincoln, out on Pioneers (Boulevard), and talked about — he's on a fixed income and the costs that are out there. That's what's on their minds," Fischer said. "And the second is security, especially our southern border."
Polling shows that , too.
Fischer, who has made national security among her top legislative priorities in Washington, has long called for the U.S. to secure its southern border, warning that bad actors hoping to infiltrate the country could do so with "tactical nuclear weapons" small enough to fit in "a backpack." She repeated the line to the College Republicans this month.
She also helped vote down a bipartisan border bill this year that "the most conservative border security bill in four decades.” Democrats accused the GOP of souring on the bill , who wished to keep the border in the political spotlight.
As voters head to the polls with the economy top-of-mind, Trump, the nominee at the top of the GOP's ticket, is vowing to impose tariffs on imported goods that he argues would protect American factory jobs from foreign competition.
Fischer is unconvinced. She said she is "of course" concerned with the former president's proposal. But that does not mean she has rethought her support for her party's presidential nominee, who endorsed Fischer's reelection bid last month.
"You can't agree with everybody all the time," she said. "But with Donald Trump, I will at least be a voice. And it has been shown with Biden and Harris, they don't have conversations with Republicans.
"So at least I'll be a voice for Nebraska that will be heard in the Trump administration."
Republican U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer is running for reelection against independent Dan Osborn.
Here is the Lincoln Journal Star's comprehensive guide to the 2024 Nebraska general election.